How that happened, what it means, and why it matters is the focus of a flavorful new exhibition at the museum that examines the Chinese restaurant and its multiple roles, only one of which is the preparation and serving of food.

The show, "Have You Eaten Yet? The Chinese Restaurant in America," reveals the humble eatery as family hub, child's playground, employment center, immigration conduit, and, perhaps most of all, intersection of white and Asian America, each one influencing the other.

On loan from the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New York, "Have You Eaten Yet?" tells its story through oral histories, menus and other memorabilia, showing how local restaurants such as the legendary Cathay Tea Garden in Philadelphia helped introduce Chinese cuisine to the country.

"It adapted to American tastes and American desires," says co-curator Cynthia Lee, MoCA's deputy director of programs. The people who ran the restaurants were savvy business people who "understood what people wanted, and how to play up certain ideas about Chinese culture."

Most of the Chinese who immigrated to the United States during the mid-1800s knew little about the restaurant business, but they quickly became acquainted with the discrimination that confined them to the jobs that white workers didn't want, laboring as launderers and cooks.

By the turn of the century, entrepreneurial immigrants had parlayed those beginnings into a business niche.

Opening a restaurant required little in the way of start-up costs, and prices could be kept down through the free or low-wage labor of family members, says Grace Kao, director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Moreover, she says, owning a business created a means of upward mobility.

A portrait of Henry Tinchin Loo hangs at the exhibition's entrance, and in it he looks every bit the prosperous Western businessman, dressed in white shirt, tie and cufflinks.

Loo opened the Little Paris in New York, started the Shangri-La in Beverly, N.J., and, by the mid-1960s, was running the Orient in Philadelphia.

Loo and his contemporaries knew that to survive, they needed to appeal to their American clientele.

First, they altered traditional Chinese recipes to cater to American palates, avoiding unusual meats and adding sweeteners. Second, knowing that customers wanted more than food - they wanted an experience - proprietors designed their restaurants to promote an exoticized vision of Chinese people and culture.

It was a delicate balance, the exhibition shows. If the unusual strayed into the strange, customers would be put off. A restaurant had to simultaneously offer mystique and accessibility.

Restaurant owners set out chopsticks - along with diagrams showing how to use them. Placemats became small billboards to explain Chinese family traditions.

Menus became more than lists of meals and prices - they became communications documents, the artwork reinforcing the idea of the exotic, the text a way for the owners to introduce themselves.

Some businessmen even included their own photos and autobiographies. And some, the exhibition shows, pursued that presentation into self-parody.

Some wrote menus in pidgin English, praising their chef as a "numba one China cook" and pleading, "Please you no bling liquor to my place." One named his eatery the Led Looster Lestaurant.

The China Doll, a New York nightclub and restaurant, sought to lure patrons with a production called Slant Eyed Scandals.

"Not everyone played that game, but some did," Lee says. "It was playing up on what they perceived as the public, mainstream view of Chinese: 'This is a touristic experience for you, and you're going to get it."'

For the people who worked there, the restaurants were simultaneously places of toil and joy.

As a child, Florence Trinh says, she loved being in her father's restaurant, Happy Paradise in Philadelphia. That's where she got to see her parents, who worked six- and seven-day weeks.

Her father started out working at a Chinese restaurant in Baltimore, then at another in Philadelphia, saving enough money to open the Happy Paradise in the late 1960s.

Several years later, he opened a bigger place a block away, Happy Garden, and the family moved into an apartment upstairs.

Trinh could operate a cash register by the time she was 6, and she worked at Happy Garden until she graduated from high school.

"I look back at it and I think it did me good, because it gave me a good work ethic," says Trinh, who now lives in Marlton, Pa. "I saw how hard my parents had to work for what we got."

Josephine Park had a similar experience. In the 1980s, when she was growing up in Albuquerque, N.M., she and her sister worked in their mother's restaurant, the Fu Shou. They did everything from washing dishes to waiting tables.

The Fu Shou had eight tables, and they were usually full.

"It was a real success," says Park, who now teaches Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "We only stopped out of fatigue."

That was the time when Chinese restaurants began to see something new: Chinese customers. They arrived from across China, part of a new wave of immigration that followed President Richard Nixon's trip to China.

As customers, these newcomers wanted authentic cuisines. As business people, they began opening their own restaurants, often specializing in regional dishes.

Today there's no such thing as a typical Chinese restaurant. They range from small, take-out counters in city neighborhoods to upscale restaurants that proffer Shanghai cuisine.

"Now the whole issue is 'authentic' - and what exactly is 'authentic'? And really who cares, if it's good?" says Little.

"It's a bittersweet story. I would like for people to really see this as part of the American journey."

"Have You Eaten Yet? The Chinese Restaurant in America" continues through Sept. 10 at the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia, 15 S. Seventh St., Philadelphia. Hours are Wednesdays through Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is $5, $3 for seniors and children 13 to 17, free for children 12 and under.